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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

10 Day Novel Challenge: Day 6

Thought about titling today as day 5b.  But decided to keep going  with regular numbering.

Drug myself out of bed at noon. Good almost 9 hours sleep. Started pot of beans going in crock pot, fixed breakfast, and read emails/scanned blogs while eating.  Discovered my package had arrived, but not time to check it out. Had to be ready to go at 1:30, so not much time. Wife showed up a bit late, so we rushed off about 1:40 pm to clean a big house and an office. Returned home a little after 8 pm.  By 8:30, we're eating beans with mushrooms. I catch up on emails while eating.

About 9 pm, I open the Dragon Speak Naturally box up, and proceed to install it. That takes a while, then I go through setting up a profile, registering with support, activating it, and training it to my voice. Start doing some test runs in Libre Office Writer. First problem I had was it kept putting in multiple "well" and "him" mixed in with my words. Tried the help file, but it was no help. Googled it, and came across an article about it. Said it was related to nose and mouth breaths on the mic, and to reposition it.

About the time I tried that, it started giving me a hookerr_nonotifywindow error and stopped working. Another Google search turned up an incompatibility with Adobe Acrobat 10. Followed its instructions and got it working again. Another try, this time with the mic positioned well to the side, I had less insertions of those words, but still there. I'm beginning to think this mic is picking up too much background noise.

By this point, it is 11:30 pm. Wife is getting ready for bed and she needs some attention as she's depressed about the car situation. Not just the hassle of figuring out what we will do, but she really liked that car, so she's in some form of grieving over it being gone. So I spend some time with her until she heads off to dream land.

I move operations into the living room, since I can't talk while she's sleeping. I decide the headset I have is better than the one that came with the program, so I give that a try. No more stray words are inserted randomly, so I decide to attempt some novel writing with it.

I get started at 12:39 am. It is a little slow, because it keeps plugging in the wrong words, failing to put in spaces, capitalize sentences, and such. Plus, I've got to teach it my character's names, like Roth and  Selene. It works, but obviously I've got to get used to it. But I seem to be making a lot of corrections in the text. I stop after 40 minutes of reading. I entered 190 words using that method. An average words per hour of 317. Nowhere near blazing. I can see it can be fast, but make take a little further training to get up to speed.

Meanwhile, I feel I've spent enough time tonight on the thing, and decide to go back to regular typing so I can hopefully get over 1000 words tonight. I move all my stuff back into my room, and start working on the novel at 2:20 am. I go at it solidly for a couple hours, stopping at 4:24 am. I put in an additional 1048 words.

That makes a total for the day of 1238 typed in 2.6 hours. Tomorrow I should have more time, but do have to help wife clean a house and pick up son from Austin to spend the weekend with us. But hope to have more time overall to work on the novel. I may spend some time with Dragon Speak, but unless it starts speeding me up, may not keep using it for this novel. Maybe in time it will work for me.

10 Day Novel Challenge totals for Dragon City:


Day 1: 2281 words in 3.5 hours (652 w/h avg.)
Day 2: 1907 words in 3.25 hours (587 w/h avg.)
Day 3: 1494 words in 3 hours (498 w/h avg.)
Day 4: 2071 words in 3.45 hours (600 w/h avg.)
Day 5: 0 words in 0 hours (0 w/h avg)
Day 6: 1238 words in 2.6 hours (476 w/h avg)

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Novel Progress: 8991 words in 15.8 hours
Words per Hour: 569
Words per Day: 1499

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